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Talk-06: The Jousting Mission for COLREGS Safety Evaluation (DemoDay 2024)
Michael Benjamin, Tyler Paine
COLREGS based collision avoidance is a core capability for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) operating in the presence of other vessels whether they other collaborating vessels, or neutral or adversarial vessels. Multi-vehicle encounters are substantially harder than single 1-1 encounters, and safety testing involves a virtually unlimited number of possible circumstances. The number of edge cases that can be tested in simulation is much higher than for in-water tests. The mission described here, the "Jousting Mission" is a designed to be run on the water to maximize the COLREGS difficulty and variability with as little human setup and supervision time as possible, to maximize the safety/compliance testing in a given window of (typically expensive) test range time.
The jousting mission, in short, proceeds with all vehicles starting on a circle, and then transiting to the opposite side. At the opposite side the vehicles perform a Williamson turn to ensure the vehicle returns to the circle with a heading pointed to the opposite side. In simulation, the vehicles can simply be started on the circle. In field-trials, the vehicles are launched from the shore and proceed to the test area, and arrive at different times. Even if the vehicles all started on the circle, due to the non-deterministic nature of maneuvering with collision avoidance, they lose their synchronization. In this work we present a method for keeping the vehicles in synch, to ensure maximum contact density as the repeatedly drive through the circle. Thus making full use of test range time by challenging the vehicles repeatedly with the most challenging multi-contact situations.
This work will be demonstrated with at least five (MIT modified) Clearpath Heron USVs during Demo Day on the Charles River.
During the mission, the operator will be able to dynamically alternate between the following modes of contact COLREGs compliance, to test ownship performance.
- All vehicles running COLREGS
- One or more contact vehicles performing ad-hoc collision avoidance (not COLREGS)
- One or more vehicles proceeding without any collision avoidance maneuvers
Categories:
- USVs
- Autonomy Testing
- COLREGS